Last week, as part of our coverage of Free: Data, Elle downloaded her data from Gmail and Facebook, and responded to it. “I imagine there’ll be a lot of ex-boyfriends, who I don’t have any reason to contact anymore, forming a blip,” she predicted. “There might be a little bit of going back, finding it and deleting it afterwards – you know, damage control.”
In the age of social media, no change in relationship status goes unnoticed, either by your concerned Facebook friends (“<3 you okay, hun?”) or Facebook itself as it tempts you with hot singles in your area.
Brooklyn-based interactive editor Lam Thuy Vo has recently set up a Tumblr to quantify the dissolution of her two-year marriage. She says:
Divorce is hard. Putting this process into numbers, images and data visualizations is helpful. It yanks me out of these all-consuming moments of sadness and helps me understand how, perhaps as time passes, things are going to be ok in the long run (looking for positive trends within the data!) I hope these web things can help you, too.
Using social media tools, she shares the routes she takes to avoid hanging out in her empty apartment, and the impact divorce has had on her sleep patterns. "It's been a good way to occupy myself," said Vo.